TARGET QADDAFI

By Seymour M. Hersh; Seymour M. Hersh is working on a book on the Reagan Administration's foreign policy for Random House.

Published: February 22, 1987

EIGHTEEN AMERICAN WARPLANES SET out from Lakenheath Air Base in England last April 14 to begin a 14-hour, 5,400-mile round-trip flight to Tripoli, Libya. It is now clear that nine of those Air Force F-111's had an unprecedented peacetime mission. Their targets: Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi and his family.

The mission, authorized by the White House, was to be the culmination of a five-year clandestine effort by the Reagan Administration to eliminate Qaddafi, who had been described a few days earlier by the President as the ''mad dog of the Middle East.''

Since early 1981, the Central Intelligence Agency had been encouraging and abetting Libyan exile groups and foreign governments, especially those of Egypt and France, in their efforts to stage a coup d'etat - and kill, if necessary - the bizarre Libyan strongman. But Qaddafi, with his repeated threats to President Reagan and support of international terrorism, survived every confrontation and in the spring of 1986 continued to be solidly in control of Libya's 3 million citizens. Now the supersonic Air Force F-111's were ordered to accomplish what the C.I.A. could not.

That the assassination of Qaddafi was the primary goal of the Libyan bombing is a conclusion reached after three months of interviews with more than 70 current and former officials in the White House, the State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency and the Pentagon. These sources, a number of whom were closely involved in the planning of the Tripoli raid, agreed to talk only if their names were not used. Many of them, however, corroborated key information. The interviews depict a White House decision-making process that by early last year was relying on internal manipulation and deceit to shield true policy from the professionals in the State Department and the Pentagon.

The interviews also led to these findings:

* The attempt last April on Qaddafi's life was plotted by a small group of military and civilian officials in the National Security Council. These officials, aware of the political risks, operated with enormous care. A back channel was set up to limit information to a few inside the Government; similar steps had been taken the year before to shield the equally sensitive secret talks and arms dealings with Iran.

* Much of the secret planning for the Iran and Libyan operations took place simultaneously, so that the Administration was pursuing the elimination of one Middle East source of terrorism while it was trading arms with another. The two missions involved the same people, including John M. Poindexter, then the national security adviser, and Oliver L. North, the N.S.C.'s deputy director for political-military affairs.

* There was widespread concern and anger inside the National Security Agency over the Administration's handling of the Libyan messages intercepted immediately after the April 5 terrorist bombing of a West Berlin discotheque. The White House's reliance on these messages as ''irrefutable'' evidence that Libya was behind that bombing was immediately challenged by some allies, most notably West Germany. Some N.S.A. experts now express similar doubts because the normal intelligence channels for translating and interpreting such messages were purposely bypassed. As of this month, the N.S.A.'s North African specialists had still not been shown these intercepts.

* William J. Casey, then Director of Central Intelligence, personally served as the intelligence officer for a secret task force on Libya set up in mid-1981, and he provided intelligence that could not be confirmed by his subordinates. Some task force members suspected that much of Casey's information, linking Qaddafi to alleged ''hit teams'' that were said to be targeting President Reagan and other senior White House aides, was fabricated by him.

President Reagan's direct involvement in the intrigue against Qaddafi - as in the Iran-contra crisis - is difficult to assess. The President is known to have relied heavily on Casey's intelligence and was a strong supporter of covert action against Qaddafi. But Mr. Reagan initially resisted when the National Security Council staff began urging the bombing of Libya in early 1986. Some former N.S.C. staff members acknowledge that they and their colleagues used stratagems to win the President over to their planning.

THE PLANNERS FOR THE LIBYAN RAID AVOIDED the more formal White House Situation Room, where such meetings might be noticed by other staffers, and met instead in the office of former Navy Capt. Rodney B. McDaniel, the N.S.C.'s executive secretary. The small ad hoc group, formally known as the Crisis Pre-planning Group, included Army Lieut. Gen. John H. Moellering of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Michael H. Armacost, Under Secretary of State for political affairs, and Richard L. Armitage, Assistant Secretary of Defense for international security affairs. Most of the planning documents and option papers on the bombing were assigned to a small subcommittee headed by North; this committee included Howard J. Teicher, the N.S.C.'s Near East specialist, and Capt. James R. Stark of the Navy, who was assigned to the N.S.C.'s office of political-military affairs.